At about this time in 1960, we were startled to hear from Dad that we would soon be moving to Italy, as he had been told he would be sent to Genoa to work in the Shell office there. While it would be heartbreaking to leave Venezuela, I was prepared for it, and looked forward to such a move. At least the family would be coming with me. As the appointment was not to take effect until some months in the future, we made the most of the time we had left. “Conozca a Venezuela primero” suggested the office of tourism (get to know your own country first), so Dad gave us a choice: did we wish to see the world’s highest waterfall, Salto Angel, named after Jimmy Angel, the pilot who first discovered it, or travel to Pico Espejo (Mirror Peak) near the city of Merida, founded in 1558 on a plateau beside the Rio Chama in the Venezuelan Andes Mountains. Since the Angel Falls were virtually inaccessible except by air, it was an easy choice.
On the drive to Merida in the Andes after an overnight stay in Timotes, and an early-morning drive to see sunrise over the Pico del Aguila (Eagle’s Peak), the highest point in Venezuela accessible by car, we continued along the famous but daunting unpaved Ruta de Las Nieves (Snow Route) that climbed torturously upwards, stopping at one point to give a lift to two substantial cheery Andean ladies toiling along with heavy loads on their backs. I had to climb into the cargo space of our small Vauxhall station wagon to make room for them; the switchback road with its twists and turns gave me quite a headache, but the deep gratitude of our passengers was ample compensation for the discomfort. There were frequent warning signs of derrumbe! (landslide), we had breathtaking vistas of misty tree-clad mountains, some rockfall, and humble cliffside villages, and at higher altitudes, the omnipresent frailejon, a hardy flowering shrub, a member of the sunflower family. I took the same route twenty years later with Sheila in a rented Ford Fairmont much larger and considerably more powerful than our 1959 Vauxhall with its puny but determined little 1.5 litre engine. Very little had changed. We came across a section of road, the oncoming left-hand side of which had simply fallen into the abyss below, marked only by a one-word handmade sign, invisible at night, that some considerate villager had put up: ‘Peligro’ (Danger) it warned. Once in Merida, we took the longest and highest cable-car ride in the world to the top of Pico Espejo, rising from 5,000 to 15,000 feet where a statue of the Blessed Virgin looked out on a majestic vista of glittering snow and ice at what seemed like the top of the world. Ever the romantic, my mother often expressed a desire to have her ashes scattered in the Andes, a wish we were unable to grant her more than a half-century later. She is prosaically buried beside Dad in an Ottawa cemetery.
